Where’s Angus?

An annotated guide to the cover of Green Day’s Dookie.

Green Day’s Dookie turned 20 this month. With more
than 20 million copies sold, it’s the best-selling punk-rock album of
all time. It’s also probably the best-selling record illustrated
entirely with colored pencil, and definitely the best-selling album with
a cover featuring poop-throwing dogs, an American Gladiator or a Chia
Pet.

The cover features a scene of
shit-covered chaos on Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue drawn by East Bay punk
Richie Bucher. Bucher—who plays bass in a band called Courtney and the
Crushers fronted by his girlfriend, Portland native Courtney
Castleman—was connected to Green Day through its pre-Tré drummer and his
work for the zine Absolutely Zippo.

“Their first drummer was John Kiffmeyer,”
Bucher says. “My band Soup used to play with his old band a bunch. So
when Green Day first came around, we said, ‘Oh, John’s new band! They’re
supposed to be really good,’ and they were. Right away you could tell.”

The rest was left to Bucher.

“All I had to work with was that it was Green Day and the album was called Dookie,” he says. “I used to listen to the Kerplunk!
album all the time, and the first two songs especially just sounded to
me like a fighter plane swooping down. That was the way in for me, the
anchor for building the rest of the drawing. They didn’t give me a lot
of guidance, which was nice, and I just sketched out the basic design
and brought it to them. Once they approved the sketch, I went back and
fleshed it out with the crazy stuff in my head.”

Here, for the first time, Bucher talks
about the illustration.

“That was from the Ramones’ record Rocket to Russia,
drawn by John Holmstrom. Holmstrom was a cartoonist and magazine
publisher, and he did a lot of artwork for the Ramones. I just wanted to
give him a shout-out in there. ‘Eat at Chef Wong’s’ was on a T-shirt in
the cartoon in the art from Rocket to Russia.”

Oil refineries in the Northeast Bay.
“That’s where the Green Day guys are from. It’s just part of the
landscape—and part of what I wanted to represent. Something we drove
past every day…. It never would’ve occurred to me to have the Golden
Gate Bridge or San Francisco in the background. I grew up in Berkeley
going to San Francisco a lot, but it just wasn’t a part of what this
record was about.”

Free Huey Newton. “More Berkeley shit.
There was all kinds of political stuff around town. That kind of
graffiti was pretty common. It was part of growing up on Telegraph
Avenue. When you were in ninth grade, you had the Revolutionary
Communist Party trying to recruit you.”

Caffe Mediterraneum on Telegraph Avenue.
“It was there since the early ’50s and was kind of a hippie place. We
used to hang out there in high school, smoke cigarettes and stuff.Supposedly, it’s the place where Allen Ginsberg wrote Howl, but I don’t know to what extent that’s true. But apparently he used to hang out there, too. It was that type of place.”

From the cover of Black Sabbath. “It’s a really spooky picture, a vaguely witchy Ozzy. That little snippet is a line from a song on that record.”

“Those dudes were a depiction of people
who’d come to hang on Telegraph from the other suburbs. They pretty much
all looked the same, with baseball caps and goatees.”

University of California Marching Band. “They were always marching around playing. I thought they were pretty great.”

Local photographer Murray Bowles. “He was
a really fantastic photographer who’d take pictures of all the bands
playing in the ’80s up until now. He had his own style of taking
pictures: right in the pit, hold his camera up and just shoot. Really
fucking awesome stuff.”

“The girls loosely represent girls in a band called Raooul.”

“Winchell’s Donuts on San Pablo, near
Marin [Avenue], is where we used to go after shows. I just wanted to
throw in a fat cop and somebody ripping him off, which was sort of a
reference to this band the Rip Offs that used to play around that time.
They were a garage band and they used to wear masks. I thought I’d throwa guitar on that guy and make him a Rip Off, specifically Jon Von.”

Twisted Dog Sisters was a group of
teenage girls in Berkeley. “Not really a gang, but a group of girls
who’d hang out on Telegraph.”

Angus Young, from the cover of Let There Be Rock.
“That was stuff I was listening to at the time, probably while I was
drawing this. That album cover was one of my favorites, so it’s a shout
to that.”

Alex Chilton of Big Star.

Patti Smith from the cover of Easter.

The logo for the band Filth, drawn by Jesse Michaels. “They were punks from the East Bay. He’s got a brick, ready to throw.”

“My emblem, which I used to draw every
day on my hand in high school because I was just fucking angry. A year
or two later, it became part of the logo for my band Soup.”

You might recall having seen a larger version of the
Dookie art, a poster-sized version that expounded upon the original
scene. The original album cover wasn’t a cropped version of this, as it
turns out. Rather, it was added by Bucher later at the request of Green
Day’s record label.

“They had me do the cover first and then asked me to add
on for a poster. I probably would’ve done it a little more cohesively if
I had done it the opposite way around,” he says.

Here’s what the posted included.

A bottle of Mad Dog bum wine. “Occasionally, yes, we would
drink Mad Dog. But in the poster it was because of the dogs. I thought
it was kinda clever.”

The Hello Kitty Kitty cat. “I was in a band for a little
while called Here Kitty Kitty—it was around that time, and I use to draw
flyers and stuff for that band. That cat was sort of like an icon that I
used for that band. The cat’s actually in a few different places on the
cover. It was more throwing that in because it’s my own personal
thing.”

Lulu the snake and Keeton the cat. “That was my pet snake
LuLu. She was pretty awesome and the cat was my roommate’s cat, his name
was Keeton.”

A Mercedes and a woman yelling at a man with a car phone
cord around his neck. “A lot of the stuff—maybe half—is really specific
and others is just cartoons I dreamed up. There’s no real story behind
that except for hating yuppies and me making idiots out of them.”

Santa and the streaking dunce. “I drew this around
Christmas time—the record cover itself I finished in October of ‘93 and
then they wanted me to add on for the poster so I was doing that during
the Christmas months that year.

Rick Star. “The guy singing ‘Moon River?’ His name was Rick Starr, he was a street performer.”

The pig’s head from The Lord of the Flies.

The guy in a tutu. “Berkeley was just kinda filled with
freaks—awesome freaks. That wouldn’t be terribly unusual to see: some
old balding white haired dude walking around in a tutu.”